Hiromi Ito’s “The Thorn Puller” tugs the reader in two directions at once. First, into the guts and gore of ordinary human struggle: the pains of growing older, fraught relationships with loved ones and struggles to juggle a career and childrearing. Then, into the realm of the cosmic: broken curses, received blessings and the legends of spirits and the book’s namesake, Togenuki Jizo, the “thorn-pulling bodhisattva.”
The Thorn Puller, by Hiromi Ito,Translated by Jeffrey Angles.300 pagesSTONE BRIDGE PRESS, Fiction.
In this way, Ito folds in the mythic with the mundane to connect the everyday types of suffering with the most divine kind of metamorphosis. This shapeshifting work flexes innovative literary devices while maintaining a Joycean directness in its approach to the crude banalities of life.